Cats were first domesticated roughly 9,000–10,000 years ago, most likely in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, as people shifted into farming and began storing grain that attracted rodents. Evidence of a close human–cat relationship appears in a Neolithic burial from Cyprus about 9,500 years ago, where a person was deliberately buried with a cat, implying that the process of domestication was already underway by then.

Early domestication timeline

  • Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests cat domestication began around the time agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent, about 10,000 years ago.
  • The famous Neolithic grave on Cyprus, with a human and a cat buried together, is dated to roughly 9,500 years ago and shows humans were transporting and keeping cats outside their natural range.
  • By around 2,000 BCE, cats are clearly shown as domestic animals in Egyptian art, often with collars and living in households or associated with deities.

Where it likely started

  • Current research points to the Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent (including areas of modern Israel and neighboring regions) as the original center of cat domestication.
  • Wildcats attracted to rodent-rich grain stores in early farming settlements likely began living alongside humans, gradually becoming more tolerant and then semi-domesticated.

How “domesticated” are cats?

  • Unlike dogs or livestock, cats underwent relatively mild selective breeding; many behaviors and body forms remain close to their wild ancestors, the Near Eastern or African wildcat.
  • Modern genetic work indicates that most of the clear “house cat” lineage spread widely only in the last couple of thousand years, including with Roman and later trade networks.

Changing views and latest research

  • Older ideas credited ancient Egypt as the first to domesticate cats about 3,600 years ago, but finds from the Fertile Crescent and Cyprus have pushed the origin thousands of years earlier.
  • Recent genome studies suggest domestic cats may be even more closely tied to North African and Levantine wildcats than previously thought and that their spread into Europe and Asia happened in several waves linked to human trade routes like the Silk Road.

Quick story version

  • Early farmers store grain → rodents move in → wildcats follow the rodents → the tamest cats hang around people and get tolerated, even protected. Over many generations, these friendlier wildcats turn into the house cats that now sleep on keyboards and knock things off shelves.

TL;DR: Cats were domesticated not in a single moment but gradually, starting about 9,000–10,000 years ago in the farming communities of the Fertile Crescent, with clear evidence of close human–cat bonds by 9,500 years ago and fully established domestic cats widely spread by a few thousand years ago.